Quality-Biased Ranking of Web Documents

Many existing retrieval approaches do not take into account the content quality of the retrieved documents, although link-based measures such as PageRank are commonly used as a form of document prior. In this paper, we present the quality-biased ranking method that promotes documents containing high-quality content, and penalizes low-quality documents. The quality of the document content can be determined by its readability, layout and ease-of-navigation, among other factors. Accordingly, instead of using a single estimate for document quality, we consider multiple content- based features that are directly integrated into a state-of- the-art retrieval method. These content-based features are easy to compute, store and retrieve, even for large web collections. We use several query sets and web collections to empirically evaluate the performance of our quality-biased retrieval method. In each case, our method consistently improves by a large margin the retrieval performance of text- based and link-based retrieval methods that do not take into account the quality of the document content.